Friday, April 27
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
— "White Rabbit", Jefferson Airplane
Have fallen sloppy dead
— "White Rabbit", Jefferson Airplane
To confront the unknowable, precisely what we don’t want to know: because cinema is based upon the linking and unlinking of images, it can risk this. Nothing is nobler than to shatter a film upon such an ambition, such belief, such confidence: the cinema can manifest everything, it can be vertiginous like a coma, pitiless like a Hobbes treatise, limpid like the spectrograph of a corpse.
— Nicole Brenez
Putz grila, eu amo essa mulher.
Sunday, April 22
I've retraced my steps a thousand times
Seems like I've spent hours asking all my friends about her
Been six months but I'll never be the same
Nobody, nobody, nobody remembers her name
— "Bombshell", Operation Ivy
Seems like I've spent hours asking all my friends about her
Been six months but I'll never be the same
Nobody, nobody, nobody remembers her name
— "Bombshell", Operation Ivy
Le film est travaillé par la bestialité qui est en nous à la fois comme une menace et un destin. C'est une force vitale et très solaire. Les chiens, le soleil et la petite enfance sont pour moi étrangement proches. Cette menace d'être dévoré se déploie par ailleurs, autrement, dans l'angoisse de pénétrer les corps.
— Philippe Grandrieux
I've been in studios where a musician, for instance, would play a rhythm guitar part. He'd say, "I've got an idea for a part," and at that moment he was excited about it. He would play it, and it would have all sorts of imperfections; he would suddenly think of a variation on it halfway through that was a little bit better. So having heard that back, he'd say, "Yeah, that variation is good. I'll do that all the way through." So he'd go out and do it again.
As far as you could tell, his playing was identical. But something was lost there, and it's not something one just suspects. I'm sure it's true. Something has been lost. There's a kind of tension, even down to microscopic things like the tentativeness or certainty with which he hits a string. I'm sure that makes an acoustic difference to what happens. So I'm more and more preferring to move into a position of fooling myself, in a way, that what I'm doing is not a retractable statement.
— Brian Eno
There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere.
The resulting pictures lack the complex composition and textures of ordinary painting, but it is said that those who see well find something captured that escapes explanation.
This conviction that direct deed is the most meaningful reflection, I believe, has prompted the evolution of the extremely severe and unique disciplines of the jazz or improvising musician.
Group improvisation is a further challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.
As the painter needs his framework of parchment, the improvising musical group needs its framework in time. Miles Davis presents here frameworks which are exquisite in their simplicity and yet contain all that is necessary to stimulate performance with a sure reference to the primary conception.
Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a "take."
Although it is not uncommon for a jazz musician to be expected to improvise on new material at a recording session, the character of these pieces represents a particular challenge.
Briefly, the formal character of the five settings are:
So What is a simple figure based on 16 measures of one scale, 8 of another and 8 more of the first, following a piano and bass introduction in free rhythmic style. Freddie Freeloader is a 12-measure blues form given new personality by effective melodic and rhythmic simplicity. Blue in Green is a 10-measure circular form following a 4-measure introduction, and played by soloists in various augmentation and diminution of time values. All Blues is a 6/8 12-measure blues form that produces its mood through only a few modal changes and Miles Davis' free melodic conception. Flamenco Sketches is a series of five scales, each to be played as long as the soloist wishes until he has completed the series.
— Bill Evans, Improvisation In Jazz (na contra-capa do Kind of Blue, do Miles Davis)
